Data collection / Producing empirical material

Originally, I wanted to interview expatriates, leaders, HR managers for all of researched companies. In that case, I would have a comprehensive understanding about the situations of expatriates in Finnish companies. Because, for instance, one expatriate thought that she or he had very limited access to the company’s resource system due to the fact that he or she was a foreigner and then in the interview, he or she would claim it as a hidden type of discrimination. However, the interview with his or her leader revealed that that the resource system could be accessed by the management team, or the expatriate’s limited access was not a sign of discrimination. Moreover, my research was concerned with some leadership theories (transformational, social exchange, path –goal theory), so it would be beneficial to ask leaders whether they had practiced any of these above-mentioned theories and if they had not, they could be asked if they thought the mentioned leadership styles in Literature review would really encourage their foreign employee’ organizational citizenship behaviors. Finally, my topic is related to HR’s practice and process in companies regarding evaluation of job applicants and (cross-cultural training), hence questions directed at HR managers would have been beneficial. Therefore, opinions of three parties (expatriates, leaders and HR) would have been probably useful to generate an unbiased research result. The process of collecting data was much more challenging than I had previously thought. As discussed in previous section, I chose four cases of expatriates in different companies.

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At first, I went to Arena Career Fair at Aalto University in November 2018 and Contact Forum in January 2019 to present companies there with my research topic in order to attract them to join in my interviews. In order to motivate them, I stated that every interviewee would receive my Vietnamese gift. My primary aim was to interview big companies which probably had some cross-cultural training programs for expatriates. There were some companies which refused immediately, said that they did not want to join. Several company representatives asked me to send them emails explaining my research so that they could consider and try to find a suitable set of an expatriate, his or her manager and a HR person. Just one company was actually interested in my topic. In my opinion, it was highly unlikely that all of companies who had gave me their emails would offer to join in interviews but their chance of joining in was greater than that of organizations which I had not introduced my topic face-to face. I also collected extra companies’ email addresses from the internet to send my request. Overall, in the process 30 companies was contacted. More than half of my emails were ignored. The rest of companies’ answer was that they could not join in. They had various reasons such as they had joined in other research already so no resources was left for my research, or they could not find suitable expatriates or in most of the cases, they just acknowledged that my research was interesting but they simply could not be a part of it and wish that I would find assistance from other organizations. There was even one person who at one career fair was enthusiastic to be a part of my research. However, I sent my email to him several times with no reply received. So after the first round of meeting and contacting unknown companies did not lead to interviews for my research. I had the feeling that companies were not really interested in my research topic of diversity initiatives for foreign workers at work so they refused to join.

Therefore, in the second round of looking for interviewing opportunities, I tried to suggest to my friends and their friends who were potentially suitable for my research. They were quite enthusiastic to be in my interview. However, they said that it was very hard to reach their managers, or they leaders would not want to spend time on this research. One of my friends asserted that she would have felt uncomfortable if her senior had been in my interview because my topic was very sensitive, and she might in the future change her job,

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ask for his reference so she did not want to sabotage their relationship. Besides expatriates, I could only interview one HR manager. My friend working at a hotel had talked with her leader about persuading her HR manager to join in my interview. Her leader negotiated with her HR manager successfully. However, I had to send emails three times to the HR manager until she finally replied to me and we arranged the meeting.

One important issue regarding interview was confidentiality. At one career fair, when I introduced my research to some banks, they often inquired how my research would be published with the information of researched companies. Consequently, I had to affirm to them that all the names of companies and workers would be anonymized. One of my friends also agreed to be in my interview only in case her names and company were anonymous and I promised to her to do that.

The first interviewee (later referred to as Amy) was a Russian in a multinational company producing consumer good for daily use. She came to Finland to study the Master program of Marketing. During her studies, she worked part-time for two companies. After graduation, the latter company employed her full-time. Until now, she has been in Finland for six years. Her work at the moment was concerned with marketing and sales analysis in the company’s branch in Finland. The second expatriate (mentioned later as Bella) was another Russian woman who had arrived in Finland primarily to study Master program of Business Analysis. During her study, she completed one six-month training program regarding business data analysis at one company. After graduation, she started searching for a full-time job and finally found one as data manager in a computer software company. Until now, she had been in Finland for three and a half years. The third expatriate (Christina) from Vietnam came to Finland to pursue her Master program in Finance. After graduation at first, she worked for a one management consulting firm. Later until now she had worked as finance and business analyst for a company which made tools and equipment for everyday use at home in Finland. The fourth SIE from Vietnam (Daisy) who had come to Finland because she married a Finnish man and both had decided that they would have lived in Finland after marriage. Even working in HR in a big company in

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Vietnam before, she had had many difficulties searching for a job in Finland. Now she worked as a receptionist and waiter at a big hotel. I also had the chance to interview her HR manager at their hotel. The expatriates’ characteristics were summarized in the figure at the beginning of empirical finding part.